the year ends
Havana, Attempts, ambient extraction
hi everybody -
Happy year of the fire horse, I will never pass up an opportunity to celebrate a transition in time. I’m sitting in a cafe on the south side of the Arkansas River (pronounced our-kansas) in Pueblo. My friends, I’m reeling after spending a week in Havana, Cuba. There’s not really a way to condense my thoughts, shifted perspectives on improvisation, parallel economies, ad hoc networks. No one is here for my feeble political analysis, but its clear that the united states’ blockade and sanctions against Cuba are an inhumane attempt to starve out a nation that committed the sin of resisting american imperialism, a cruel response from powerful and scared men with weak egos. Drifting through the inhabited darkness of Havana during regular blackouts is a heartbreaking and confounding experience. I hope that the specific feeling of inhabiting 19th century colonial architecture alongside communist brutalism never leaves me, viva Cuba.
I heard the entire world in the music I heard there, as we all do when faced with Real Music. My use of “real” is complicated and problematic but you know what I mean. I’ve come home with a stack of water damaged LPs and CD-rs in thin plastic sleeves, an embarrassment of riches. Ned Sublette’s Cuba and it’s Music served as a guide to the densely interwoven history between Cuba, Africa, the US, and beyond. A dream music, really, embodied and mundane without losing an ounce of power. I haven’t realized that when I’ve talked about music as a place to live, Cuban music is what I’ve been talking about. There’s really too much to get into in this space, so feel free to email me if you’re interested or have your own experiences to share. Of course, I have field recordings and photos that I’ll share on my Bandcamp subscription and paid substack levels once I’m able to make any sense of them.
Yesterday, I published Attempts, a collection of my text and graphic scores from 2019 to now. Some of these have floated around in various capacities the last few years, but I wanted to put together a collection so that this mode of working existed in its own context. These pieces range from near-impossible Fluxus activities, to detailed instructions, to modified maps of Specific Places, and a few exercises in something approaching sound poetry. Working with highly conceptual scores has been a massive and satisfying part of my creative practice for the last few years. The process of figuring out how to realize sometimes vague notions with LEMB and Forming has made me a better musician and a better thinker. My hope is that these pieces will go on to be realized in ways I couldn’t have imagined myself.
I see all of my peers struggling through what it means to continue a creative practice in the face of atrocity, the end of empire. The term “ambient extraction” passed in front of me recently, describing something I’ve been struggling to articulate for myself. Obviously, capital and extraction are different shades of the same thing, but in 2026 extraction is so thorough as to be present in everything. Not just our money and our bodies, but our attention, humanity, care, all constantly being sapped away. Doing things together is the only way through, every moment of humanity and creativity is a threat to vampire capitalism.
Keep doing what you’re doing, I’m here in the Banana Belt in the studio and on the roads. There are a mess of records to mix and to master on the docket, write me if you’d like me to add yours. As ever, reasonable rates and high quality work with a fluid and easy working process. Music is everything, see you around.
AW